https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/trt-world/

These media sources are moderate to strongly biased toward conservative causes through story selection and/or political affiliation. They may utilize strong loaded words (wording that attempts to influence an audience by using appeal to emotion or stereotypes), publish misleading reports, and omit information reporting that may damage conservative causes. Some sources in this category may be untrustworthy.

TRT World is owned by the Turkish Radio and Television Corporation, which the government of Turkey owns.

https://www.brookings.edu/articles/understanding-turkeys-response-to-the-israel-gaza-crisis/

The first is Erdoğan’s belief in the legitimacy of Hamas as a viable Palestinian actor, which is a natural outcome of his ideological affinity for the Muslim Brotherhood. Erdoğan believes Hamas needs to be part of the political process and has moved the Turkish establishment toward that idea. Hamas has had a presence in Turkey and sent delegations there since it won the Palestinian elections in 2006. I should note that Ankara’s engagement is with Hamas’ political wing; as far as I know, there has been no Turkish support for the group’s military wing in Gaza. But Erdoğan has been open about his political support for Hamas — whose political representatives were reportedly in Turkey at the time of the attack.

…

Turkey has taken the most strident anti-Israeli position within NATO, with Erdoğan organizing pro-Palestinian rallies himself and slamming both Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the United States. But he may have gone overboard this time. Erdoğan has called Hamas a “liberation movement” — openly stating “Hamas is not a terrorist organization” and accusing Israel of committing “genocide.” Of course, this is very different from what many Arab leaders have done, which is criticizing Israel for its disregard for Palestinian civilians while also keeping their distance from Hamas.

…

KEVIN HUGGARD:

To what extent is the Turkish political response to this crisis driven by bottom-up societal demands as opposed to the top-down needs of its political leaders?

ASLI AYDINTAŞBAŞ:

No doubt the public is very sensitive to this issue — and in full sympathy with Palestinians. For the ordinary citizen, there is nonstop coverage of the suffering in Gaza and rolling commentary that Israel is able to do this because the United States allows it.

Public criticism of Hamas in the early days after the October 7 carnage is long gone. The picture that emerges in the public conversation is black and white, of the oppressor and the oppressed, with no nuance and barely a memory of what happened on October 7. There is also growing anti-Americanism for what is perceived as the United States’ blank check for Israel.

Erdoğan amplifies those sentiments and brings in an element of legitimization for Hamas by making the case that Hamas is not a terrorist organization. In doing this, he has been able to mold the public’s outlook on the issue: According to polling data from Metropoll, only 30% of respondents believe that Hamas is a terrorist organization.

This conflict has also allowed Erdoğan to make a case about a civilizational rift with the West. He calls it “crusader vs crescent” and of course, Turkey is on the side of the crescent. I worry that more and more people in Turkey are now buying this civilizational argument and think of Turkey as separate from the liberal order — which is described as immoral, bigoted, and hypocritical. I believe that the conflict in Gaza has just pushed Turkish society a few more inches towards the idea of a non-aligned Turkey.

Edit:

For anytime wondering why we should care about not legitimizing bad news sources (and I consider state-run media involving Erdogan a bad actor):

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/18/opinion/fake-news-media-attention.html

It’s often counterproductive to engage directly with content from an unknown source, and people can be led astray by false information. Influenced by the research of Sam Wineburg, a professor at Stanford, and Sarah McGrew, an assistant professor at the University of Maryland, Mr. Caulfield argued that the best way to learn about a source of information is to leave it and look elsewhere, a concept called lateral reading.

For instance, imagine you were to visit Stormfront, a white supremacist message board, to try to understand racist claims in order to debunk them. “Even if you see through the horrible rhetoric, at the end of the day you gave that place however many minutes of your time,” Mr. Caulfield said. “Even with good intentions, you run the risk of misunderstanding something, because Stormfront users are way better at propaganda than you. You won’t get less racist reading Stormfront critically, but you might be overloaded by information and overwhelmed.”

Our current information crisis, Mr. Caulfield argues, is an attention crisis.

“The goal of disinformation is to capture attention, and critical thinking is deep attention,” he wrote in 2018. People learn to think critically by focusing on something and contemplating it deeply — to follow the information’s logic and the inconsistencies.

That natural human mind-set is a liability in an attention economy. It allows grifters, conspiracy theorists, trolls and savvy attention hijackers to take advantage of us and steal our focus. “Whenever you give your attention to a bad actor, you allow them to steal your attention from better treatments of an issue, and give them the opportunity to warp your perspective,” Mr. Caulfield wrote.